Planting Design Bromley Nursing Home

We were contacted to spruce up the raised borders in a Bromley Nursing Home car park with a new planting design. The area was visible to visitors arriving at the nursing home and also to the residents themselves, as their dining room overlooked it. Top priorities were as follows:

Flowers

Interest throughout the year

Easy maintenance

As we had a tight budget to work to, we focussed on the most visible areas in the Nursing Home car park.

Planting Design Bromley Nursing Home

The nursing home car park had raised beds with a few shrubs that were worth keeping, but most were looking very sad. We removed some and pruned others. Then we improved the soil with plenty of organic matter. The soil hadn’t been mulched for some years and it was important to give the new planting a good start.

To meet the easy maintenance requirement the planting scheme included perennial shrubs that gave a changing interest through the seasons with blossom and berries. These would each only need one prune a year to keep them tidy. Then we added herbaceous perennials for flower colour to give an immediate and long term boost to the planting scheme. These are also easy maintenance as constant deadheading isn’t essential. A good trim at the end of the season will be enough.

We chose some few larger shrubs to give instant impact to the planting design. Due to the budget, most of the shrubs and herbaceous perennials in the planting scheme were planted as smaller plants. However, they were chosen to give good ground cover as they grew. A range of species was chosen to give changing seasonal interest, both form the individual plants and from the planting combinations.

A selection of alpines and succulents filled a narrow bed bordering the wheelchair ramp.